Future resident--Shawnee Miller

Shawnee is a printmaker, illustrator, and muralist from rural Northern California. She became drawn to outsider avenues of art and culture while traveling and backpacking around rural America as a young adult. Sometimes she travelled for seasonal work, applying for jobs counting fish or birds in far-off lands she had never been before. Sometimes she just wanted to see the country but had no money. She often travelled alone, sleeping in her old pickup truck or camping in the forest. Along the way she became fascinated with hand painted signs in small towns, dog mushers of the Yukon, tattooers, commercial fishing communities, street artists, cartoonists, and American hobos riding the rails. She started just using a brush pen and sumi ink on notebooks that would fit in her backpack, but gradually learned to screenprint and block print from artists she met along her travels. Shawnee combines illustrative reality with storytelling to create immersive pen-and-ink windows in to worlds that blend speculative futurism with traditional American folklore. She hopes to both acknowledge and respect the paths laid by those before us while exploring a more inclusive socially just future. She now primarily lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where she screenprints for a collective of artists in the basement of a tattoo shop.